Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel, Jacky Hougy column

4:06 p.m. EST, June 25, 2012|Jacky Hougy, Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel

It sounds like a paradox, but the election of Dr. Mohamed Morsi as Egypt's new president was a successful and right move by Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. It is a paradox because its own candidate was one of the general's own: Ahmed Shafik, a former commander of the Air Force and the last prime minister of the Mubarak era. The fates laugh: Shafik, who lost by just one million votes, was close to former president Hosni Mubarak, and was mentioned five years ago as a possible successor. But Mubarak, and especially his unseen wife Suzanne, could not help themselves, and preferred to crown their son Gamal as the heir apparent. We all know the results.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had no alternative but to manipulate the results in the way it did. Shafik's victory would have raised suspicions that nothing had changed on the banks of the Nile. It was the same old security apparatus, the same old manipulative conduct behind the scenes that had corrupted Egypt. The generals can swallow the frog that is an Islamist president more easily that the monster that they would have to fight, should Cairo again burn.

Anwar Sadat and Gamal Nasser, Egypt's former presidents, who unremittingly persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood, are undoubtedly turning in their graves. But times are no longer the 1960s and 1970s, when one opinion prevailed, and it was the opinion of the regime, and there was no voice in Cairo that was louder than the voice from the Presidential Palace and its secret police. Today, the regime is forced to share power and accept the decisions of other players in society, including voters. This is the real revolution that is now underway in the Arab world.

Today's Egypt faces existential dangers -- economic, political, and social -- and the shoulders of a few generals bear the burden of a task that is much more important than appointing a president. 80 million Egyptians are pinning their hopes that they will save them from poverty and unemployment in a floundering ship in which some passengers do not hesitate from wrecking from within.

By appointing Morsi, the generals have achieved long-term stability, which will enable them to grow Egypt and bring back the tourists who have fled, the personal security on the streets, and the capital whose flow has stopped. So what if they meddled a bit behind the scenes, disqualified the Muslim Brotherhood's charismatic presidential candidate Khairat al-Shater, and the radical Salafi Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail. In the beginning, to make democracy, patience is sometimes needed along with a dose of tyranny.

Mohamed Morsi will not be like his predecessor, with unlimited authority and power that is given only to leaders who are above the law. He will be a president with clipped wings, who will have to walk on tiptoes not to annoy his patrons, the generals, and to constantly settle accounts with the parliament that will be elected, because that is where the people's representatives sit. He will be a moderate president, not an Islamist with a knife between his teeth.

Already in yesterday's speech, Morsi said that he will keep all the treaties and conventions that Egypt has signed, a code for the Camp David Accords. This was a wink to Israel, and especially to the Americans whose support Cairo desperately needs, and of course, to the Egyptian electorate, which is fed up with adventurism. He will soon try to build a government, but the generals will continue to control foreign and defense policy. If he shows too much independence, they will know how to rein him in.

The writer is the Arab Affairs correspondent for "IDF Radio" (Galei Zahal)